O.K., Who Put the Nazi Zombie Under the Tree?

Before the recommendations, an anecdote: Beginning my research for this column, I searched Amazon Video using the term “Christmas Movies.” About 20 pages in, I saw “Zombie Lake” listed. Now, “Zombie Lake” is an unusually tatty 1981 film by the director Jean Rollin (whose best work, of which this is not an example, is grisly and poetic with a lot of erotic obsessiveness) about dead German soldiers who rise out of a lake where they’d been dumped by the French Resistance fighters who’d killed them. It is not good (even Rollin nuts rate it low), but I checked it out again to see if there was some Christmas or holiday theme I’d missed before. No dice. There’s a brief winter battle scene, atrociously cut into a narrative that takes place largely when trees are in bloom, but that’s it.

How did Amazon Video wind up recommending “Zombie Lake” as a Christmas movie? As I’m new at covering this field, I asked a couple of colleagues if they could steer me to someone at Amazon who could take my question. They responded in a way that struck me as even more curious, acting as if I’d asked them for their credit cards.

Some seemed frightened, as if there were somebody at Amazon who, if asked an unpleasant question, had the power to banish you to a cornfield. Eventually one brave soul stepped up, I sent a couple emails, and was put in touch with a very pleasant Amazon rep who commended me for my doggedness in confirming the non-holiday content of “Zombie Lake.” As this column closes, however, I still await confirmation of my surmise that the presence of the movie was a result of, as plausibility suggests, a glitch in the Amazon search algorithm. In any event, I offer a caveat emptor to users of Amazon Video: If “Zombie Lake” comes up on your own search of Christmas or holiday movies, do not be persuaded. It is not a Christmas movie.

There are a lot of holiday movies, and there are a lot more Christmas-themed holiday movies than Hanukkah-themed holiday movies (“Eight Crazy Nights,” 2002, an animated “tribute” to Hanukkah that stars Adam Sandler, can be bought starting at $2.99 from iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Vudu and Google Play, incidentally), and most holiday movies aren’t very good. There aren’t many as bad as “Zombie Lake,” but as we’ve already established … well, you know. Holiday Classic almost never equals Actual Classic. So here I’d like to recommend a few holiday movies that are at least interesting.

This is not the place to debate whether the very good, set-around-Christmas “Die Hard” is a holiday movie. I believe that if the filmmakers had intended it as such, John McClane (Bruce Willis) would have made at least one reference to a villain getting coal in his stocking. But that’s just me; if you want to watch it as a Christmas movie, you can rent it via Amazon Video or Vudu. One of my own favorite Christmas movies is also R-rated: “The Ref” (1994), the Ted Demme comedy about an abrasive thief (Denis Leary) inadvertently falling into the home of a decidedly dysfunctional family (headed by Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis) for the holiday. That picture streams on Netflix, where it is sort-of-hilariously but also accurately categorized under “Disney Christmas Movies.” (It was theatrically released by the Disney unit Touchstone.)

Netflix offers a bounty of the conventionally beloved (which also means widely disparaged) holiday pictures on its streaming service. Yes, there’s “Love Actually” (2003); the increasingly well-liked “Scrooged” (1988) (Bill Murray’s latter-day sainthood has done a lot for this picture, which was greeted with tepid reviews on its theatrical release nearly 30 years ago); and the 1954 perennial “White Christmas.” Starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney (in a relatively rare film role), this chestnut remains a very relaxed and genteel viewing experience, and has lots of pleasant Irving Berlin tunes. It can be an exceptional holiday decompressant.

Amazon’s fare is divided into the free stuff — a lot of sappy, made-for-TV dreck mostly — and options to rent or buy, including the original “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947) (nice cast, I guess) and the very engaging “A Muppet Christmas Carol” (1992). A version of the Alastair Sim version of “A Christmas Carol” (1951) is also for rent. Caveat emptor: The “Miracle on 34th Street” available free to Prime members is a 1955 television remake reuniting the stars of Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), Teresa Wright and … Macdonald Carey. (You were expecting Joseph Cotten?) The picture quality is not great. If you’re a Prime member, you can get the outré Christmas cracker “Gremlins” (1984) free, which is salutary.

More cinephile-friendly fare is available on the recently started Filmstruck, naturally. Arnaud Desplechin’s sprawling, intense and often hilarious “A Christmas Tale” (2008), starring Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric, is viewable there. (It is also on Hulu.) So is the theatrical cut of “Fanny and Alexander,” an Ingmar Bergman picture from 1982. His semi-autobiographical period epic opens with one of the most sumptuous and dramatically vivid Christmas feasts ever filmed. The movie as a whole is one of Bergman’s most audience-friendly contrivances.

There’s also a very unusual picture on Filmstruck: Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “A Carol for Another Christmas” (1964), a made-for-TV oddity. It has a nonsensically star-studded cast: Sterling Hayden is lectured by both Ben Gazzara and Steve Lawrence. Britt Ekland has a blink-and-you-miss-it silent cameo. This was actually one of four TV movies commissioned by the United Nations to foster the notion of world peace. Rod Serling’s script recasts Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” to teach its own Scrooge (here named “Grudge” and played by Hayden) to stop worrying and love international cooperation. It plays pretty much exactly as you’d expect a Rod Serling version of “A Christmas Carol” to play. It’s spectacularly dated (although Peter Sellers’s work as a future demagogue has a certain timeless quality), but if you want to boggle your movie-buff kin, this will do the trick.

The Warner Archive site has a couple of Christmas movies for the cinema cultist. There’s “Holiday Affair” (1949), which posits a romance between Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh after they indulge in some holiday-shopping department store intrigue. Frank Tashlin’s “Susan Slept Here” (1954), narrated by an Oscar statuette, sees the screenwriter Dick Powell hosting the juvenile delinquent Debbie Reynolds over the Christmas holiday, much to the consternation of Powell’s bombshell girlfriend, Anne Francis. It’s not the most wholesome entertainment — there are a lot of jokes pertaining to the actual legality of the Powell-Reynolds romance, given that her character is underage — but it is perhaps the most candy-colored Christmas movie ever made, which is not nothing.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: Who Put the Nazi Zombie Under the Tree?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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